South Korea's Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence (review)

148KOREAN STUDIES, VOL. 22 REFERENCES Choi, Hyewon. 1993. Ess is only vague: Semantics of 'past' tense in Korean. Harvard Studies in Korean Linguistics V: 537-551. Enç, Miirvet. 1987. Anchoring conditions for tense. Linguistic Inquiry 18: 643-657. Hasegawa, Yoko. 1996. A study of Japanese clause linkage: The connective in Japanese . Studies in Japanese Linguistics 5. Kim, Haeyeon. 1990. An analysis of the conjunctive morpheme -ko in discourse and clause combining in Korean. Papersfrom the Seventh International Conference on Korean Linguistics, 133-157. Koopman, H., and D. Sportiche. 1991. The position of subjects. Lingua 85: 211-258. Lee, Chungmin. 1985. Temporal expressions in Korean. In Jef Verschueren and Marcella Bertuccelli-Papi, eds., Selectedpapersfrom thefirst internationalpragmatics conference, 405^147. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCawley, James. 1971. Tense and time reference in English. In Charles J. Fillmore and D. T. Langendon, eds., Studies in linguistic semantics, 97-114. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Na, Jin-suk. 1971. Wulimal-uy ttay maykim yenkwu [A study oftense in Korean]. Seoul: Kwahaksa. Nahm, Ki-sim. 1978. Kwuke mwunpep-uy sicey mwuncey-ey kwanhan yenkwu [A study of tense in Korean]. Seoul: Tower Press. Partee, B. 1973. Some structural analogies between tenses and pronouns in English. Journal ofPhilosophy 70: 601-609. ---------. 1984. Nominal and temporal anaphora. Linguistics and Philosophy 7: 243-286. Reichenbach, H. 1947. Elements ofsymbolic logic. New York: Macmillan. Sohn, Ho-min. 1986. Linguistic expeditions. Seoul: Hanshin. Yoon, James Hye-suk. 1993. Tense, coordination, and the clausal structures of English and Korean. Harvard Studies in Korean Linguistics V: 436-446. South Korea 's Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence, ed. by Kenneth M. Wells. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1995. 247 pp., $35.00 cloth. As scholars and observers of South Korean society and politics are well aware, the 1980s represented a tumultuous period in modern Korean history. The tragic Kwangju uprising of 1980, the repressive rule of Chun Doo-hwan, the massive student-led demonstrations of 1987, and the subsequent and violent explosion of the labor movement all marked a decade replete with conflict and change. Of course, such a volatile pattern of state-society relations was arguably present throughout the entire 20th century, with state authoritarianism opposing valiant if unsuccessful attempts to secure democratic political space. However, the pattern may have changed with the June 1987 uprising. The catalyst for the uprising, which led to a more inclusive sociopolitical dynamic, was a powerful social movement which carried the moniker minjung. South Korea's Minjung Movement is the collective effort of a group of BOOK REVIEWS149 Korean experts to make historical and cultural sense of minjung, a social phenomenon which had a "considerable impact on the social, political and cultural character of modern South Korea" (vii). The text's cross-disciplinary exploration of the meaning and significance of the minjung movement of the 1980s, in particular the nationalist component of that movement, provides an important contribution to scholarly literature on Korea. The volume emerged from an international conference on the Korean minjung movement held at Indiana University in 1989, and includes perspectives from anthropology, history, literary criticism, philosophy, religious studies, and sociology. Being a collection of eleven distinct voices, the various chapters form a rather loose structure, but offer a breadth of analysis on minjung nationalism that is neatly and succinctly introduced by Wells. Three of the contributors—Kang Man'gil, Choi Chungmoo, and Paik Nakchung—speak from their experience within the movement, while the other conferees and authors demonstrate credibility with extensive knowledge of Korean culture and the historical roots of the minjung phenomenon. Two wonderfully presented contributions, from Chung Chai-sik and Kim Seong Nae, have little to say about minjung itself, but instead examine crucial links to the rich Confucian and shamanistic traditions from which the nationalist minjung movement emerged, and to which minjung intellectuals and activists often referred. The text underscores two important dimensions of the minjung movement : first, that of the movement as an active, political struggle to radically restructure Korean society; and second, that of the movement as an ideological struggle to reconstruct Korea's cultural identity, reflected in the historical roots of minjung consciousness and...